The way around this is to do the initial install with the system
plugged into broadband via an Ethernet cable and do all the updates
plus hardware drivers. Just did this on a DELL Studio laptop and when
hardware drivers were displayed there were two listed for the Broadcom
Wi-Fi card, one of which was a proprietary driver which worked fine
but if you wish to stay away from proprietary stuff the generic one
should also do the trick ( you can always try this first and switch to
the proprietary one if needed.) If you had a different Wi-Fi card then
the Live CD would have more than likely got on-line wirelessly too but
I always think that doing an initial install using ethernet connection
is a good idea as it pulls down many updates as it installs - can't do
that with Wi-Fi :-)

BTW - the DELL Studio has touch sensor buttons to control CD Player,
volume, and also eject the slot loading DVD drive. All of which worked
perfectly on a 10.04LTS installation. Customer over the moon after
being seriously unimpressed at getting hit with one of those fake AV
scams through no fault of theirs - they fell foul of the compromised
syndicated advertising feed that was hacked recently, all they did was
go to the Times web site as normal ! They were also unimpressed with
Vista overall anyway so it was a 'double whammy' getting hit !!